Moss and dirt
by cornwallace
Summary: Loss, just as everything else, is merely a part of life.


It's been ten long years since I've seen him.  
Ten years. And here he is, after all this time. Dressed in black, checking a golden pocket watch as if he were obsessed with the time, waiting, expecting something. However, this is not the vibe I'm getting from him.

Yes, I'd know him anywhere. Sonic the hedgehog. Back from the dead, if you'll pardon my wordplay, to mourn the loss of our beloved late queen.

Funny how death brings us all together like that. I hadn't spoken to Sally in almost as long as it's been since I've spoken to Sonic. Yet, here I am, under the cloudy grey sky in the presence of so many freedom fighter ghosts, gathered around the preserved corpse of our leader. And the hero! Absent from my life for longer than the rest, just three rows ahead of me, occasionally glancing up at the coffin and whatever speaker might be up there at the time, but his attention belonging to the pocket watch.

How curious, I wonder, noticing my own attention being drawn towards him more often than not. Such an important piece of my life, integral in my very existence and the shaping of who I am to this day. My best friend, brother and teacher, just hours ago nothing but mere vague memories more than likely exaggerated and distorted with age. And here he is, in the flesh.

My eyes dart back and forth through the crowd. Antoine, her widowed husband, silently weeps, trying his best to maintain a professional aesthetic, but failing quite miserably. His right hand, more than his left, though not exclusively, consistently tending to his face, I imagine wiping tears away from his eyes. The occasional sniffle or sob coordinating with the slight seize of his shoulders and back. My heart goes out to him – to all of those still close to her at her time of death.  
Death is hardly welcome amongst the living that care. Quite the opposite, even to those as distant as I.

The service is very... formal. More formal than sentimental, is how I would put it. How fitting, from my distant memories of Sally Acorn, our late queen, that she would maintain a professional envirement even in the event of her death.

There's a very solemn atmosphere here, with the aura of heartbreak you might come to expect from a funeral. I've been to quite a few in my life, but none since Knothole. None in a very long time. And this time I feel somewhat more detached.

As the body is lowered into the ground, the crowd slowly dwindles until the three of us are left in our seats. Antoine, Sonic and myself. I don't know what presence keeps me here in the seat of this folding metal chair in the middle of the cemetery, but it's there and I'm aware of it.

I watch Antoine rise and make his way over to his wife's final resting place, falling to his hands and knees and breaking down. An emptiness swells inside me and I feel broken, myself. Sonic stands with the help of his cane and follows in Antoine's footsteps, approaching him from the right and stopping just next to him. He says something I can't hear. This catches the sobbing man's attention. Antoine looks up helplessly at him, and dries his face on the back of the sleeve of his jacket. Sonic offers his hand and he takes it as more words are exchanged. A handshake turns into a hug and Antoine departs on his own, a fleeting glance and a nod as he walks past me. Standing with some unknown trepidation, I make my way towards my brother.

As I near, Sonic examines his pocket watch once again, and as I get closer, I notice that the watch doesn't work. Lost in time, stuck on 11:17, he closes the watch and says aloud, "you can't run forever," and he tosses the broken clock into the open grave.  
I find myself suddenly very aware of myself, anxieties about whether or not he should turn around and notice me, and just what he might he might notice me looking at during his seemingly meaningful moment of silence. Whether or not I should say anything at all, or if I should just turn and walk out of his life forever, just as he walked out of mine.

Unsure of myself, I stop just short of him. I do nothing. I say nothing.

"Tails," he says, welcoming me without turning around.

I laugh somewhat nervously as I take the step forward to join his side. "Tails," I repeat. "I haven't been called that in ages."

He looks up at me and I barely catch the remnants of a spark in his eye that I knew so well in my youth. I can tell just by looking at him that he, just as I, can only barely recognize the one he once knew under all the growth.

Quite a lot has changed.

"Oh?" he asks me sincerely. "Would you prefer Miles?"

"No," I say, glancing down at the pocket watch with my peripherals, a bright and shining gold reflecting the light of the sky against the hard browns of the coffin and dirt. "Tails is fine."

Turn my attention back to him. His gaze had followed mine and stopped as he stares into the final resting place of our fair leader as if it were the void.

"I suppose you're wondering how I could possibly have the never to show my face here."

"Not nearly," I say. "More curious as to what happened."

"I made a promise to you ten years ago," he says absently. "That I would see you soon."

"Ten years is soon enough in the grand scheme of things," I say. "How are you?"

His head shoots up to look at me, a subtle look of surprise on his face. "Drinks?"

"I don't drink," I confess.

He smiles warmly at me, as if proud. "Coffee, then? Would that be okay?"

"Sure," I say, returning the smile. "That would be nice."

Our walk to the nearby coffee shop is quite the contrast to how things used to be. When I was little, we would race across the landscape, me struggling to keep up. He would slow down, just enough to keep me in range. Always giving me something to strive for, a friendly challenge without competition. This time, we casually walk side by side, me slowing my pace down to accommodate my old friend and his cane.  
Surprisingly, he knows the city well enough to find the nearest coffee shop without any guidance.

We don't start comfortably speaking until we're at our table and the waitress has brought us a pitcher of coffee and two mugs.

"So," he says. "What have you been up to? Rather, what are you doing these days?"

"Mostly answering questions," I say, laughing as bitterly as the coffee. Add three packets of artificial sweetener and two cups of cream, stirring idly with a spoon as I talk. "I occasionally write software for the company I work for. Apparently it's too complicated, but I get the feeling that if anyone was properly trained at my place of business save for myself, it wouldn't be an issue. I do a week's worth of work in a day and spend the rest of the week answering questions and finding ways not to be bored."

He nods and smiles, sipping on his black coffee.  
I hate to ask, but I'm compelled to do so before my filter kicks in.

"What was up with the pocket watch?"

His face turns into a grimace for a brief moment, and I feel guilty as he looks down into his cup.

"I'll always love Sally Acorn," he says, finally, and I'm not sure how to respond. I look at him, dumbfounded before he continues. "The watch was a gift from her to yours truly, years and years ago. Something of a keepsake of us. Our memories. Memories that continue to fade. Memories I had to finally let go."

"Closure," I say. He nods. "The watch doesn't work."

"It hasn't for years. I don't know how to fix the thing, but honestly, that's really not what I kept it for anyway."

"You've been here awhile," I say.

He nods again. "Two years."

"Why haven't I seen you yet?"

A shrug. "Waiting for the proper entrance, I suppose. Besides, I didn't think you'd want to see me."

"What would make you think that?"

Sonic looks up at me uneasily, as if he doesn't want the next words that come out of his mouth to be the truth. But I already know it is, and so does he.

"When I said I'd see you again soon, I knew it was a lie. I didn't know if I'd ever see you again, honestly."

I'm sort of at a loss for words. My eyes drop to my coffee.

"I guess I already knew that," I say. "By the way you said it. By the look on your face."

"Do you remember that day?"

"Of course I do. Robotnik was dead. Of this, you were sure. We were getting ready to leave Knothole and recolonize the city and you said you were staying. Your leg was broken from getting captured. I said I'd stay, too, but you insisted I didn't. You told me to just go, and you promised me you'd see me soon. I didn't believe you, but I didn't have much of a choice. I was fourteen at the time."

"You know me too well," he says.

"Why? I've waited ten years for the answer to that question. Why?"

"I..." he pauses, the expression on his face reading that he knows what to say, but he's desperately looking for the words with which to say it. "I didn't want to destroy you. What you were."

I look up – his gaze is sincere and somewhat grave.  
Bags hang under his eyes. He's tired, and not just in some physical sense.

"I can't-... you..." my thoughts are stubborn about forming themselves into coherent sentences. "What does that even mean?"

"I wasn't the same person you knew." His expression doesn't falter. "I'm not the same person you knew."

"So?" I find myself annoyed, but can't say exactly at what. I'm just well aware of it. "What happened that night Robotnik died? What the hell changed?"

He sighs and buries the side of his face in his left palm, elbow propped up against the table. "I watched the only thing keeping us together kill himself."

"What?" I ask, disbelief washing over me. "You can't possibly mean.."

His head pulls its own weight and his hand drops to the counter, lapsing over his other. Sonic looks me in the eye.

"I do," he says.

"Robotnik didn't keep us together," I say. "We did. We kept ourselves together. Kept ourselves strong."

"United under a common goal," he says. "Working together to keep ourselves strong and fight against our common enemy. Making a collective effort to strike back on what opposed our beliefs, our mindsets, our dreams."

"That's-"

"What he told me, right before he shot himself," Sonic says without emotion, cutting me off.

"I don't believe that," I tell him, looking away. Out the window, watching all the Mobians pass each other by.

"I didn't either. Not when he told me. But I thought about it. He was right. We needed him."

"We needed him?!" I scoff. "Needed him to destroy our people, our home? Turn us into robots? Force us into hiding, to live in fear?"

"Is the loss of your worries, fears, pain and regret such a bad thing, Tails? As for the other stuff, like you said, he kept us together. Made us strong."

"You're wrong," I say.

"Am I?"

"Yes."

"How long has it been since you've been close to any of us?"

It's been years, he's right. But my fists tighten and my eyes meet his, regardless, blinking away welling tears of anger.

"Maybe if you hadn't abandoned us ten years ago, we'd all still be friends."

His expression still doesn't falter. He isn't smiling or frowning. He just believes in what he says, and he looks tired.

"I deserve that," he says. "You still mean a lot to me. You're still my best friend to this day. That's why I didn't want to break the news to you. I didn't want to crush you."

"What are you?" I ask.

"I'm a man who's been broken by fate," he says.

Sonic stands up with the help of his cane and throws some money for the coffee on the table. He smiles at me, almost warmly.

He's insane. He has to be. I feel confused. I'm kind of terrified. I feel alone for the first time in a long time.

I laugh, somewhat desperately and I ask him; "how can you justify this? How do we fix something like this? How do we make it better?"

"It's not that simple," he says, sighing. "Life's not that simple. Entropy is the fate of this world, with our without justification."

I can't think of anything to say to that.

"Robotnik told me, before he shot himself right in front of me, that if I wanted things to stay the way they were, someone would need to succeed him. There needs to be balance, somebody needs to draw evil to inspire good. I couldn't do it. And I couldn't break the illusion for anyone else. I just hoped it would last. It didn't."

His words sting, the way he talks, the way he looks at me. He looks down at me and nods.

"It was good to see you again."

He turns away and walks out the door, and out of my life once again.

I think about it.

Good. Evil.  
Remembering a time when I believed very much in both and had very strong feelings about them.

Looking out the window again, turning my attention to and losing myself within the crowd of lost souls swarming the streets.

It occurs to me that I haven't even thought about what's good or evil in a very long time, and I wonder if I truly believe in it anymore.

Parasites aren't evil. They're just unfortunate. Maybe you could say that about all cruelty.

I reacted strongly to what Sonic had said as if I stood behind every word of protest.  
Truth is, I hadn't thought about it.

You could argue doing a good thing is bad or a bad thing is good up and down until you lost sight of your initial point.

Ultimately, just as moss and dirt, we are all just natural products of this planet.

And the way this world works is a mystery.


End file.
